dwen.co.nz

Matt Dwen

Google have just dropped Web Starter Kit on the world, which is their “opinionated recommendations on boilerplate and tooling for building an experience that works great across multiple devices”. This project is part of Google’s larger Web Fundamentals project. It’s similar to Bootstrap, which I use regularly, in that it provides a framework of re-usable elements, and starting place for the structure of your page. One thing it has over Bootstrap, is it includes automated...

I finally had a chance to experiment with flexbox, a fancy new “coming soon” feature for CSS. Browser is support is getting close. Chris Coyer has good write up of all the features: http://css-tricks.com/snippets/css/a-guide-to-flexbox/ It’s a fantastic system which is going to solve a lot of layout problems. Anyway, what I was trying to achieve was a layout with two fixed width columns, and a third fluid which fills the remaining space. Normally I would...

While SilverStripe should largely work out of the box under IIS, I ran into a few issues getting it running on Azure. I created a new free Azure custom web site so I could create an associated MySQL database at the same time. I then downloaded everything locally using the recommended SilverStripe Installer via composer, then ftp’d straight into the new Azure account. The installer gave me some warnings about fileinfo not being enabled, and URL...

I’ve recently started using Grunt to auto build change logs for the PHP framework I’ve developed at Xplore, and I’m interested in doing the same for DIVA. Doing this in OS X is one thing, Windows I’m expecting to be completely another. I figured I’d document this for my own reference when I need to do it again. Trying all this in Server 2012 trail running in a VM if it makes any difference. Installing...

I have performance issues. And it’s nothing a little blue pill is going to solve. I’ve had to disable functionality in a project I’ve been working on recently, because the execution time was waaaay to slow for a website. It’s a PHP-MySQL project, and I was expecting it to be slow, but not that bad; I’m talking minutes to render a filter system. After some benchmarking of PHP, I turned to checking out the DB...